In New England, there is a time between winter and spring when the combination of freezing nights and warm days starts sap flowing in the maple trees. This is sugaring time, when families like the Laceys of central Vermont engage in that still-flourishing American tradition, the gathering of maple sap for boiling into delectable maple syrup.
Sugaring is hard work. Kathryn Lasky and Christopher Knight, award - winning author and photographer of The Weaver’s Gift, follow the Laceys as they use their magnificent Belgian horses to break a path laboriously through the snow to the maple tree stand. With help from their children and a small neighbor, Alice and Don Lacey drill 200 holes, position 200 spouts, and hang 200 buckets and "hats." Over many days sap drips into the buckets and is hauled by sled to the sugarhouse where three generations of Vermonters work together, exchange wisdom, and swap stories surrounded by the "muffled roar of the fire and the bubbling tumble of sap. Christopher G. Knight's brilliant photographs and Kathryn Lasky's evocative text transport readers to the bleak grandeur of the Vermont countryside, to the cold and warmth, to the sights and sounds and mapley smells of that glorious time - sugaring time.